A ruthless government sets about its work

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John Howard is spending frantically in a bid to hurt Labor and buy votes, writes Kenneth Davidson.

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones unless they have cornered the market for stones.

John Howard has a lot of stones. It is almost impossible to open a newspaper or tune in to commercial TV without seeing taxpayer-funded advertisements extolling the benefits of Coalition policies.

The biggest spend is the Coalition's Medicare advertising blitz, in which it is claimed the Government is "strengthening Medicare"! The ads suggest the Government is defending Medicare, when in reality the Government has been undermining it since it came to office in 1996.

The ads are based on a lie. Medicare was set up as a universal service. All the so-called reforms introduced by the Howard Government have been designed to "incentivise" (the 30 per cent private health insurance rebate) or stampede (age-rated private health premiums and starving the public hospital system of funds) people into private health insurance, to create a residual public health system for the poor.

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The policy is one thing. Publicly financed lying propaganda is quite another. Howard's only defence is that he is doing the same as Labor did in office.

So how do they compare? According to information extracted in Senate estimates, the Medicare campaign is expected to cost $21 million. It is part of the 2004 Government advertising on 21 campaigns - covering issues ranging from family benefits to illicit drugs - which will cost $109 million in media bills alone.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald (27/5), a spokesman for the Special Minister of State, Eric Abetz, justified the advertising blitz on the grounds that it was less than the $148 million spent in 2001 on the "Unchain my heart" GST campaign.

The spokesman said the Keating government spent $78 million in the 1996 election.

Oh yeah? According to the Auditor-General report on Commonwealth spending on political advertising (performance audit No. 12, 1998), campaign advertising in the 12 months to January 1996 totalled $45 million.

The Howard Government is spending about $20 million a month of taxpayers' money justifying Government policies that are generally strongly opposed by Labor, the Democrats and the Greens - and which, like the GST in 2001, are the least popular of the Government policies likely to play a key role in the election.

The Government has access to a $109 million taxpayer-funded slush fund. By comparison, total public funding for the 2001 election was budgeted to be $44.4 million, allocated on the basis of each candidate getting at least 4 per cent of formal first preference votes - that is, the equivalent of $1.94 for each formal first preference vote for both the houses of Parliament.

To win this election, the Government is prepared to abuse the legal system as brutally as it is prepared to raid the exchequer. On Monday, the Prime Minister announced the appointment of retired NSW judge, David Hunt, QC, to conduct a three-month judicial inquiry into the 1991 arrangements for leasing offices for the Australian National Audit Office in the ALP's headquarters in Barton, Canberra.

The imputation is that this was a corrupt bargain, with the lease set well above the market rate to create a continuing slush fund to finance ALP administration at taxpayer expense.

Howard would well know, or should have known, that there has already been a royal commission into this leasehold agreement, conducted by Trevor Morling, QC, in 1994 in response to an earlier smear campaign.

The terms of reference were open, the inquiry exhaustive. The report concluded that the 15-year lease (including the 9 per cent escalator), which was independently valued before it was signed, was "well supported by historical rent movements" compared with similar quality buildings in the area such as John McEwan House, Bligh House, Industry House and the IBM building, where the equivalent annual rent movements ranged between 9.35 per cent and 14.31 per cent.

The royal commissioner said: "I think it likely that there would not have been public controversy over the terms of the Centenary House lease if it had not been for the identity of the lessor. I conclude that the terms of the lease are reasonable, are not unduly favourable to the lessor and are not inimical to the interests of the Commonwealth."

If the Prime Minister is looking for a leasing agreement grossly unfavourable to the interests of the Commonwealth, he can look over the Centenary House backyard to the R.G. Casey Building.

It is emblematic of the $62 billion asset sales program, which had led to a massive transfer of wealth from the Commonwealth to private interests and resulted in a $4 billion fall in Commonwealth net worth over the past four years.

According to the Auditor-General (Audit Report No. 4, 2001-2002), the sale and lease back of Casey House by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (and two others) resulted in a rental that was $4.5 million a year above the valuer's assessed market rent for the properties in the first year. (The excess would be even higher now.)

The Department of Finance, which is the department responsible for implementing the sale and lease-back process, responded to the highly critical audit by rejecting every one of the report's recommendations and said, according to the report: "Finance was not charged with the role of protecting the 'overall' interest of the Commonwealth."

Which just shows you what a compliant and unprofessional department can get away with when it is prepared to do whatever it is asked to by a ruthless Government.